Finally, from Midge:
Sorry if this is so late, Ma'am
Ana, but I was only able to find the words to
describe my mother when I found
the Banana Yoshimoto novel Kitchen last week.
At any rate, here's the
essay: it follows right after the dotted line.
Midge K. Manlapig (Zeny K.'s girl)
The Gilding of a Most Unusual Mother: A Daughter's Sentiments on her Mother's turning Fifty
by Midge K. Manlapig
I think I was about seventeen or eighteen when I realized
that my mother was
not like everyone else's.
Come to think of it, it came at the time when I also realized
that I wasn't
like everyone else either.
I must admit that I hated my mother while I was growing
up. Until I
turned eighteen, everything wrong that happened to me
was my mother's fault.
I felt that my point of view was
justified because my mother would scold and she did believe
in corporal punishment whenever
my brother and I did anything wrong. It was so frustrating.
However, what I didn't understand was why I wasn't going
crazy the way my peers
were going crazy. They had it so
easy: their mothers were indulgent. Their mothers let them
do as they pleased. Their mothers
let them go places where I wouldn't ever be seen. So why were
their lives going down the drain
while I was working my way to the top? It was only recently
when one of them told me that it
was because their mothers weren't there to guide their steps.
That particular realization seemed
to freeze my blood when it first hit me. I had accused my
mother of being unfair to me for
nearly two decades. The truth of the matter was that I, not
my mother, was the one who was being
grossly unfair.
***
These days, my mother just happens to be my best friend.
We go to the movies together. Sometimes I treat
her to some really good restaurants
or take her out for some very good
coffee. Sometimes she's the one who treats me out.
Other times, I buy her stuff like
the cologne she couldn't find at the shops or that nice Japanese
brand of chocolate-coated almonds.
Still, particularly when I house-sit while the rest
of the family's gone to the seminary to pay my kid
brother a visit, Ma brings home a box of cinnamon rolls to
be shared with my kid sister. It's really
nice to have a mother like that! Nowadays, we also do a lot of stuff
that most girls do with their mothers
when they're younger. When we're walking somewhere, she puts
her arm around me and I feel really safe and cozy.
Whenever I'm utterly peeved with those creeps I used
to call friends, she's there to listen to me.
Amazingly, unlike the days of my childhood, my mother
and I can talk to each
other now. We talk about so
many things until about one in the morning. My job as a freelance
writer-cum-animation concept developer-cum-creative
consultant. Her plans for her retirement. Our family
- both her side and my father's. My siblings. Our ancestors.
(We discovered that our
ancestors were displaced 17th Century
Japanese Christians quite by accident.) The future.
(A future we've tried to divine
through Tarot cards and Feng Shui sticks and cartomancy and
God only knows what else.)
Things that we could never talk about in the days when I was so cold
towards her and she couldn't figure
out what she was going to do with me.
Come to think of it, when you boil everything down, my
mother is the only real
friend I've ever had.
***
It hasn't really been all sugar and spice, though.
Nothing in this life ever
is. And it was probably hell
for my mother - raising the three of us the way she did. With
my brother in the seminary, my sister
a mere prattler of eight, and myself a regular artistic
primadonna, you'd have to canonize
my mother with regard to her patience and fortitude. Sure,
my father was there, too, but there
was something about my mother's way of dealing with three difficult
children that really sticks in my mind.
In my case, there are two incidents that stick fast
to my memory.
When I was a kid, the guidance counsellor was always summoning
my parents to
her office because I kept crying
in class for no apparent reason. The said guidance counsellor
mentioned that I wasn't quite right
in the head and needed professional help. You should've
seen my mother's face when she came
home after that: she looked ready to send every single guidance
counsellor she knew to hell. To
my mother, I was just a normal kid who had trouble coping in
a school where we had to kill or be killed (figuratively
speaking, naturally!). I was
just going through a phase, of course.
However, just to make sure, she issued all the usual threats
and slapped the usual slaps.
I turned out pretty normal, thanks to her and no thanks to
the Freudian wannabe who made us
both so miserable.
Quite recently, I had a really bad manic-depressive stage
and my mother told
me off quite firmly that I was either
to stop being so infantile and get my life in hand or suffer
the consequences. I'll admit I was
terribly bitchy with my mother for the next week or so, but
she was right. I whipped myself
out of my snit and I guess she was happy with the results. Mothers
are always right when it comes to giving
advice to their children no matter how old they'll be.
So there.
***
No matter how I look at it, I simply cannot imagine my
mother not working.
My earliest memories of her always place her in the school
where she has taught
for more than twenty-five years.
I would be three or four years old at the time and she would
take me along and leave me in the
library so I wouldn't get bored. Amazingly, I didn't.
(And neither did my brother and
sister when it was their turn; we all love to read so the library
was the best place to keep us quiet.)
Sometimes, I would peek into my mother's classroom and see
her explaining
away to her students. She always seemed so patient,
then; and this has always
made me wonder why she says she
hates teaching.
My other memories of my Ma are the times when I'd wake
up in the middle of the
night and see her working the wee
hours away at her drawing board. It has occurred to me that
my mother hardly ever did office
work like everyone else's mothers nor did she ever get into
the business of being a full-time
housewife. I guess that's always impressed me.
Now that I myself am working, often slaving away the wee
hours on my word processor,
I realize that my mother did all
this to give us the stable future we're all looking forward
to. Perhaps she was preparing
me for the time when I, too, would do this for my own children.
***
Someone asked me if I would trade in my mother for someone else.
I said no.
When pressed to explain why, this was what I said:
"A lesser woman would have given up on our family a very
long time ago. At
least my mother is strong enough
to deal with all of us no matter what happens. Besides, if anyone
else had been my mother, I'd have
run away as soon as I was born. If I had my life to live
over and I had a say as to whom
I'd like to be born to, I'd still choose my Ma to be my mother.
Anyone else would be unthinkable."
So there.
***
My mother is fifty years old now.
The way she says it, you'd think it was some sort of curse.
I like the idea
of being fifty despite the fact
that I'm only twenty-two.
It's like the Good Lord blessed you enough to let you
live till you've reached
the half-century mark. To
let you live an utterly unusual lifestyle. To let you go places where
most people will never even see
in books or on TV. To get married and move away from home.
To have three kids and find some
degree of delight in them no matter how weird they seem.
To work freelance for more than
25 years and manage to have fun every once in a while. To give
you a field of experience much broader
than that of your peers. As my generation would say,
reaching fifty is wicked cool.
I feel sad that the time is fast approaching that I should
move away from home
to start one of my own. It's
not like I'll be cutting my ties to my mother whom I've so recently
learned how to appreciate.
But I might make my home in some foreign land and I won't be seeing
her as often as I'd want to - and
that's going to be pretty harsh on me.
Perhaps I will someday have a daughter of my own and she
will ask me at some
far-off time what her grandmother
was like as my mother. All I can say is that my mother is an
amazing woman who says she's just
an ordinary person - when she's actually the most unusual person
I've ever met and will ever meet.
***
My favorite author Banana Yoshimoto is only in her early
thirties, but she has
summed up everything my mother has
wanted for me and my siblings in these lines from her
book Kitchen. In this particular
passage, the character Eriko Tanabe speaks of the trouble
she went through bringing up her
son: "You know, I haven't been able to devote myself
full-time to raising him, and I'm afraid there
are some things that slipped through the cracks...
I know I haven't done everything right... But
I wanted above all to make a good kid out of him and I focused everything
on raising him that way. And you
know, he is. A good kid."
I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't easy keeping
up with my mother and
that she hasn't exactly been a mother
to us full-time and no one can really do everything right.
But she always made sure that we
would grow up to be good people. We, her children, have had
our doubts, but she was right.
She was absolutely right.
